Collaboration

TM Forum's Collaboration Program is a "Virtual Research and Development Consortium"
made up of TM Forum members for a growing array of industries, including communications
- telco, wireless, cable and Internet; cloud; defense; content; and information
services.

All of the programs and initiatives underway at TM Forum are designed to help our member companies improve operational agility while reducing costs and risk, engage customers, expand market share and drive revenue growth through new services.

We count on members like you to not only set the priorities for our work, but also to contribute to these projects that will shape the future of the communications, cloud, eHealth, smart energy and other industries.

All projects are found in our online Collaboration Community. Click here to go to the projects page and sign up for projects.

Applied Frameworx for Digital Health
This project is focused on applying TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of best practices and standards to Digital Health transformation and addressing the critical area of interoperability. Interoperability, or the ability “to create end-to-end solutions by interconnecting components and systems from multiple vendors to form a network,” is one of the most difficult challenges – and opportunities – facing health information systems globally.

Applied Frameworx for Smart Energy
New, disruptive technologies, such as Smart Grids, are being introduced at an increasing pace to the electric energy industry worldwide. IP, ICT, and state-of-the-art networking technologies are often taking a predominant role alongside entirely new breeds of both hardware and software. The build-out of Smart Grids often means that entire new networks and network operational models needs to be created and put in place, something which the utility industry traditionally has not focused on. This project will work to apply the best practices and standards in TM Forum Frameworx to address these new challenges.

Catalog Management

The key driver for catalog management is to provide a consistent standardized method of storing and exposing product offerings to consumers, developers, and supplier partners. To provide this exposure, catalog management requires standardized interface methodology. This project will focus on delivering REST-based APIs for exposure of product offering and customer facing services for consumers.

Customer Engagement Management

The Customer Engagement Project Group addresses the comprehensive subject of all interaction with customers across the broad range of traditional and digital services. This project focuses on developing a series of best practices and KPIs for defining, measuring and improving customer experience and applying them into the service provider environment and vendor products.

Data Analytics

The Data Analytics Project Group addresses the comprehensive subject of the structure and use of data in managing the enterprise, with a particular emphasis on customer engagement applications and big data issues. This group will work on Frameworx metrics, the highly successful Big Data Guidebook and much more.

Frameworx Metrics Repository Automation

This project will result create a set of governance processes that allow automation within the Frameworx Metrics Repository as well as the specification of machine interfaces to the repository to allow easy integration of the repository with other software systems. In addition, the group is working towards hosting of third-party metrics specifications.

Frameworx

This project consolidates the work of the TM Forum’s core models -- Application (TAM), Business Process (eTOM) and Information (SID) Frameworks, and the Frameworx Architecture work stream into a single project group. The current focus for Frameworx is all about ensuring that the models and architecture fully support digital services. The group is addressing topics including multi-role, multi-industry and multi-channel support; metrics development; functional definitions to enable faster service deployment; and support for virtualization.

Open Digital

TM Forum’s Open Digital Program focuses on overcoming the challenges of end-to-end management of complex digital services, enabling an open, vibrant digital economy. This project will be split out into a number of work streams as follows:

Digital Ecosystem: Developing and driving adoption of an ecosystem of APIs for to support the lifecycle of digital services

Taxonomy rationalization – determine from a user perspective the range of existing taxonomies used to share threat information, the effectiveness of them and how they/their use, might be improved.

Secure Digital Services – Federated ID Management. To create best practice operational agreements for operational use of Identity and Privacy management standards where multiple partners need to work together to deliver services to end users.

The TM Forum Integration Program (TIP) project defines requirements, use cases, information models and detailed interfaces specifications for various management areas such as assurance, fulfillment and security. The goal of TIP is to produce a harmonized suite of management interfaces for OSS integration. These interfaces are known as the Operations Management Interfaces.

ZOOM (Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations & Management)

ZOOM specifically targets business agility by defining a framework necessary to enable the delivery and management of physical and virtual resources and services while simultaneously dramatically lowering associated capital and operational expenditures. This necessitates a new architecture that supports dynamic adaptation between changing needs and the capabilities of the infrastructure, enabling targeted and personalized services to be rapidly created, changed, and retired. ZOOM leverages the capabilities of NFV and SDN.